May is "World Wrestling Month" -- at least that's what the sport's international governing body has decreed.

So how to celebrate? Jake Herbert, who won silver at the 2009 world championships, tweeted two suggestions: "wear (your) singlet to school? family wrestling match?"

All excellent ideas.

As for Penn State coach Cael Sanderson, who won Olympic gold in 2004, he kicked off the occasion on the Nittany Lions' Coaches Caravan, a pep rally of sorts for fans headlined by football coach Bill O'Brien that makes stops at various East Coast cities.

Sanderson's team just won its third consecutive national title, but on the Olympic stage the sport is on life support. The IOC executive board surprisingly recommended the removal of wrestling from the Summer Olympics beginning in 2020. The IOC will meet from May 24-27 in St. Petersburg, Russia, to decide which sport or sports to recommend for 2020 inclusion among eight candidates: wrestling, baseball/softball (as a joint bid), karate, roller sports, sport climbing, squash, wakeboarding and wushu. The final vote will be made at the IOC general assembly in September in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"The fight's definitely on," Sanderson said Wednesday. "I can't imagine the IOC expected this kind of fight, but I don't think you'd have the same intensity if they would have dropped a different sport outside of one of the top 10 sports. There's a lot of people doing a lot of things, and that's probably the only way that it's going to get changed.

"I just can't imagine – it still hasn't really sunk in to me that wrestling might not be in the Olympics because – it's just got to be in there. It's one of the original sports."

Sanderson also said some of the recent changes to the sport have been baffling.

"I think FILA (wrestling's international governing body) did their best because they have changed wrestling in the last eight years to rules where they don't necessarily make sense – they're confusing – but ultimately FILA is trying to make it more exciting where it comes down to a last-second action that determines the winner," he said. "But in the same move, they're taking a lot of what wrestling is out of the sport and it's more confusing and it's more subjective and there's more chance involved.

"I think it's very important that wrestling steps back and gets back to the core values of, you know, it's a controlled fight. It's strength and all your physical and mental abilities against an opponent. Take out the subjective rules and make it easy for anyone to watch because right now, if I flick on the TV and I don't know wrestling, there's no way I can understand really what's going on and how it is scored. So that's a major problem and it's something they need to address and I'm hoping that they are."

"To win in wrestling, you've got to be able take your opponent down and put him on his back. That's really what wrestling is. It's control. Just get back to the basics."